Losing the cinema of the future – the ‘default’ scenario

The following scenario is based on the assumption that pure market forces drive the evolution of the technical ecosystem surrounding the cinema industry, and projects the direct consequences of this evolution onto the future of cinema preservation in Europe.

For many decades now, FHIs around the world have been playing an objective role of support to the film industry by bearing the costs of storing, conserving and preserving film works; this was particularly true when catalogue titles were not producing any revenues – in other words, before the advent of cable TV first, and DVD and Blu-Ray later.

In Europe, this role of support has been played by numerous FHIs, some of them (the national archives) are officially and legally entrusted with the preservation and conservation of the national cinema production (this is not the case in the US, though). FHIs both in the US and Europe have been restoring and preserving cinema works basically from the very beginning of their history.

With cable TV and home-video, cinema catalogues turned into ‘assets’ as they acquired an economic value. This led to a renewed cultural and commercial interest in film restoration that continues to today. In most cases and in most countries this then led to a closer collaboration between FHIs and rights-holders.

In very broad terms, and with an inevitable degree of simplification, this collaboration took two very distinct forms in the US and in Europe.

In the US behind early ‘pioneers’ like Sony and Warner, all major studios and some of the smaller producers have developed an important activity of preservation and restoration of their catalogues, alone or in collaboration with FHIs. Funding for this activity comes largely from the studios, with a significant contribution from private donors and foundations (this being the normal way of funding FHIs in the US where public funding is virtually non-existent). In other words, in the US it is true that the industry is funding the digitisation and the restoration of a very large number of works per year, with FHIs increasingly focusing on works that lack support (independent, avant-garde, documentaries, etc.).

In Europe on the other hand, virtually all restoration activities have been financed by public funding usually via FHIs²⁹. The last few years saw some (limited) funding coming from donors and sponsors, and some activity in the field of digitisation and re-mastering, largely due to the demand of TV channels for new High Definition masters.

If anything, the recent initiative of the French government³⁰ to fund the digitisation of French classics show that even in the context of one of the strongest cinema

29 With the exception of documentaries and newsreels that were often digitised by the owners because they were seen as more likely to produce revenues as stock footage. But feature films were always considered not worth restoring, at least until the beginning of this century.

30 See http://www.cnc.fr/web/fr/actualites/-/liste/18/135306

industries in Europe, the European private sector is not able to fund the digitisation of its catalogue.

The reasons behind this reality are the same that concur in making the European cinema industry less competitive than others, the fragmentation of the market, the relatively low appeal for European works outside the (often relatively small) domestic market, and last but not least, the fragmentation of the industrial structure, with a very high number of companies producing few films per year³¹. The downward trend in post-production costs and the increased access to the market offered by D-Cinema clearly will not help the consolidation of this market, but rather lead to its further fragmentation.

For all these reasons, this study considers it extremely improbable (to say the least) that the European film industry as such (i.e. as a whole, while of course individual exceptions are always possible) can and will bear the costs or undertake the necessary organisational changes required to preserve new digital works, and to digitise the significant number of works produced in the past.

As a consequence, this means that unless actions are taken by the public sector to support FHIs in their activities of digitisation and digital preservation, the ‘default scenario’ facing European cinema, meaning the scenario that is doomed to happen if no actions are taken, is definitely that of a double loss:

¾ In the very short term (literally months in some MS, and perhaps two years in the others) film distribution will make a massive migration towards digital projection. The demand for 35mm projection copies will be dramatically reduced. At the same time, film capture will move to digital, causing the same dramatic decrease in the demand for 35mm film negatives and laboratory work. As a consequence the supply of film stock will fall either to zero or to very small volumes, driving a strong increase in prices if/when quality has still to be maintained, which in turn accelerates the reduction of 35mm based activities to a very small niche of high-price, low-volume speciality products and services.

¾ Production masters of new “born-digital” films are not transferred onto 35mm elements because of lack of on-film distribution. Digital masters stored by the producer at the producer's premises are generally stored on a hard disc drive or LTO tapes³², with neither infrastructure nor processes in place to secure long-term preservation of digital works. 5 to 10 years after the end of the initial commercial exploitation phase, most of the data stored on these drives and tapes will be definitively lost.

¾ Working copies of these digital masters will be kept by technical laboratories subcontracted by the producers, as is current practice in some facilities

significant volumes of digital material already handling

33. These laboratories,

31 This is a well known factor, but an interesting example can be taken out of the analysis carried out by

the “ThinkTank on European Film and Film Policy” on the 344 European films that were in the official selection of Berlin, Cannes and Venice, 2002 – 2005 and Toronto, 2004 and 2005. Among other interesting statistics, the ThinkTank’s analysis shows how these 344 films were produced by 40 producers, that 17 of them had produced more than 16 films in those four years (2002-2005), but that none of them had produced more than 10 films in every one of the those four years.

32 Linear Tape-Open, the dominant data tape format http://www.lto.org/

33Information on working practices gathered during interviews with different organisations in the course of gathering information for the project.

however, are unlikely to be the traditional laboratories with the associated benefits of a long history of analogue film processing and archival. Most of them will be new digital labs centred on digital post-production, and will be based heavily on dynamically changing IT infrastructures and workflows.

Increasing competition in this area will drive further price reductions, and make it uneconomical and almost impossible for digital labs to reliably and securely preserve over the long term huge amounts of digital data (2 to 8 Terabytes per digital master) unless this becomes a paid service.

¾ Charging producers the actual cost of active data preservation, including format and technology migrations every 5 years or so, will not be possible as most producers will generally not be able to pay the price required to maintain the data alive. This will force the labs, after a period of time, to either delete data or decide not to include them in the next migration. In most of the cases digital master data kept on the labs' premises will be lost some 10 years after the end of the active exploitation phase.

Those masters delivered and stored using encrypted formats, driven by fears of “digital piracy”, will be subject to even greater threats and risk, as the same uncertainties will govern the fate of all actors involved in the encryption / decryption chain. It is highly likely that any data stored in encrypted form, where the producers have kept full control of the key systems, will be lost within 10 years.

¾ It is likely that some producers will be satisfied with maintaining only lower resolution “masters” that are dedicated to existing distribution channels such as DVD and Blu-Ray, as there is an immediate commercial return for these lower resolution versions³⁴, and the size and storage costs are much lower than those of full-resolution digital masters. But home-video standards and customers' requirements change every 10 years or so, making lower resolution versions eventually irrelevant for both cultural and economic purposes.

¾ All films produced before the full transition to digital will not be accessible in their original film format as theatres will accept digital material only. Digital copies will have to be created, representing a cost that will grow rapidly over time as analogue film equipment and expertise diminishes and eventually ceases to exist. Such digital copies will face the same threats and fate as described above for “born-digital”

works, this being aggravated by the perception that such digital copies are of even lower value than film originals.

¾ In this “default scenario”, which is unfortunately almost certain if no radical initiatives are launched to counter fundamental trends at play in digital technology and market evolution, Europe will face two dramatic losses impacting its culture, identity, history and its economy:

¾ most “born-digital” works will be lost as they will cease to exist 10 years after production, and

34For example, the “Projet de dispositif du CNC – Numérisation d’œuvres cinématographiques

patrimoniales” foresees the return to film after digitisation having a resolution of 2K (format IMF 2K). See http://www.cnc.fr/web/fr/actualites-/liste/18/135306 “le projet de dispositif du CNC”.

¾ most works produced in the 120 years preceding the present “digital revolution” will be lost as they will no longer be accessible any more to the wider public.

Summary

• It is extremely improbable that the European film industry can and will bear the costs or undertake the necessary organisational changes necessary to preserve new Digital works, and to digitize a significant number of works produced in the past, without public support.

• If no actions are taken, Europe faces a double loss:

• 5 to 10 years after the end of the initial commercial exploitation phase, most of the digital films will be definitively lost.

• most “born-digital” works will be lost as they will cease to exist 10 years after production, and

• most works produced in the 120 years preceding the present

“digital revolution” will be lost as they will no longer be accessible any more to the wider public.